Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  that women had a greater moral seriousness than men because of their constant consciousness of death in childbirth. [128] Right or not, Mather was expressing a radical turnaround in the ancient Christian stereotype of women as naturally more disordered than men and more open to Satan’s temptations. Back in England, the Oxford don Richard Allestree anticipated Mather’s remarks by observing in 1673 that, amid his devotional publishing (he was the anonymous author of the wildly successful Whole Duty of Man ), he considered that women had hearkened to his message far more than men, and that ‘the reputation of Religion is more kept up by women than men’. Like Astell a few decades later, Allestree regretted Protestantism’s rejection of the ‘angelical’ state of celibacy – as a result some suspected that, behind the anonymity of his prolific works, a female author was concealed. [129] By the seventeenth century, even Counter-Reformation clergy began to look past the misogynistic clichés of the past and notice that women were easier to teach than men – and might even shame men into behaving better. [130] As women appeared to show themselves more devout than their menfolk (and, gratifyingly to ministers and priests, often more appreciative of the clergy’s toil), centuries of disparaging theological comments based on medical discussion of humours and a continuous spectrum of gender began to look less convincing. So, in quiet ways, a radical reconstruction of the relationship of the sexes was unfolding, although in the process it opened up a more precise divide between male and female identity. The joint story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation embraces successful female subversions of patriarchy and discreet adaptations of public ideals to reality. It is a dialogue between theology and circumstance: sometimes Christian theory transformed situations, while sometimes theologians found ways of dealing with and explaining situations in danger of escaping their control. At the end of it, around 1700, Western Christianity was becoming a worldwide religion in both its confessional forms, thanks to the expansion of colonial empires. It was discovering how disconcertingly different other long-successful societies might be throughout the world. Christianity was also about to find itself much less able to set agendas in matters of sexuality, gender and marriage. Part Five NEW STORIES

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "Use this please. Just yell when you're ready." There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him. Some coy little message stitched on like: "If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store." Ignoring the K.Y., he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up against a glass brick wall. "Old Glass Cunt," he sneered, and saw a cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights. He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants. Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed, a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair. He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skul-less, eyes like burning pus. "Something wrong?" said the nurse indifferently. She was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked up the jar with obvious distaste. The nurse turned to him: "Are you waiting for something special?" she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. "Why no...." "You can go then," she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door. "Do I have another appointment?' She looked at him in disapproving surprise: "You'll be notified of course." She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression. As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow. "Some- thing wrong ?" Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals. "Let your hair down, chicken. You'll feel better." The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl's face like a great dangling tit. "Fuck off you!" Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen's spayed animal brown eyes. "Oh! I wouldn't be calling any names if I were you, chicken. You're hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute." 'What do you mean by that?" Carl demanded. "Oh nothing. Nothing at all." "Well, Carl," the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl's mouth.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Catholic priests faced a new reality of celibacy, leaving many struggling to cope with the emotional consequences in their own lives. Some took out their frustrations and anguish on vulnerable young people. Piarist expansion of schools for the poor offered the opportunities – far more than ever before. Power over the young was there for clergy to misuse, filling emotional chasms. In the background was the ongoing din of the Reformation struggle between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic layfolk were being taught anew to revere priests as a caste apart, marked out by celibacy; when some clergy misused this special status, Catholic Church authorities naturally felt defensive under Protestant attacks. They had little sense of their own structural problem, and no developed procedure to deal with it. So the poisonous silence of unintended consequences persisted through embarrassment and shame, but also for lack of any right analysis. It was easy to blame just a few bad apples, and so it has long remained. COMMON CONCERNS : THE REFORMATION OF

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  6 While Coyne concedes that mātauranga Māori ‘contains “practical knowledge,” like how to catch eels, that could conceivably be inserted into science courses,’ the natural sciences are universal, and not limited to or determined by any national or tribal identity. It made no sense to Coyne that contemporary scientific understandings of the origins of the universe were being depicted as a western ‘creation myth’ and placed on an equal level with its ‘indigenous’ alternatives in New Zealand. Mātauranga Māori is important to an understanding of the cultural history of New Zealand and ought therefore to be taught in anthropology or sociology courses – but not in science. Coyne makes an entirely fair point in stressing that the fundamental method of the natural sciences is universal. In one sense, ‘scientific’ knowledge is defined by the manner of its acquisition and validation, not the social, tribal, religious, cultural or gendered identity of scientific practitioners. To be a natural scientist is to step inside this specific understanding of human knowledge production. Yet there is a deeply problematic historical dimension to this matter which seems to have been overlooked here – namely, the role of the natural sciences in the British colonial endeavour. To appreciate the problem, let us consider a lecture delivered to the Anthropological Society in London on 1 March 1864 by Charles Darwin’s colleague (and occasional rival) Alfred Russel Wallace. Alluding to the subtitle of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), 7 Wallace made the following statement: It is the same great law of ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,’ which leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact. The red Indian in North America, and in Brazil; the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander in the southern hemisphere, die out, not from any one special cause, but from the inevitable effects of an unequal mental and physical struggle. The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical qualities of the European are superior; the same powers and capacities which have made him rise in a few centuries from the condition of the wandering savage with a scanty and stationary population to his present state of culture and advancement, with a greater average longevity, a greater average strength, and a capacity of more rapid increase, – enable him when in contact with the savage man, to conquer in the struggle for existence, and to increase at his expense. 8 This statement raises difficult and disturbing questions about how Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were interpreted within British colonial thinking and practice concerning the role of ‘favoured races’ in Australia and New Zealand.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Advani never made it to Ayodhya, because he was arrested on October 23, 1990, but thousands of Hindu nationalists from every region of India had already assembled at the site to begin the mosque’s demolition. Scores of them were shot down by the police and hailed as martyrs, and Hindu-Muslim riots exploded throughout the country. The Babri mosque was finally dismantled in December 1992, while the press and army stood by and watched. For Muslims, its brutal destruction evoked the horrifying specter of Islam’s annihilation in the subcontinent. There were more riots, the most notorious being a Muslim attack on a train conveying Hindu pilgrims to Ayodhya, which was avenged by a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. Like the Islamists, Hindu nationalists are lured by the prospect of rebuilding a glorious civilization, one that will revive the splendors of India before the Muslims’ arrival. They have convinced themselves that their path to this utopian future is blocked by the relics of Moghul civilization, which have wounded the body of Mother India. Countless Hindus experienced the demolition of the Babri mosque as a liberation from “slavery”; but others argue that the process is far from complete and dream of erasing the great mosques at Mathura and Varanasi. 68 Many other Hindus, however, were religiously appalled by the Ayodhya tragedy, so this iconoclasm cannot be traced to a violence inherent in “Hinduism,” which has, of course, no single essence, either for or against violence. Rather, Hindu mythology and devotion had blended with the passions of secular nationalism—especially its inability to countenance minorities. All this meant that the new Ram temple had become a symbol of a liberated India. The emotions involved were memorably expressed in a speech by the revered renouncer Rithambra at Hyderabad in April 1991, which she delivered in the mesmerizing rhymed couplets of Indian epic poetry. The temple would not be a mere building; nor was Ayodhya important simply because it was Ram’s birthplace: “The Ram temple is our honor. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity … We shall build the temple!” Ram was “the representation of mass-consciousness”; he was the god of the lowest castes—the fishermen, cobblers, and washermen. 69 Hindus were in mourning for the dignity, self-esteem, and Hindutva, the Hindu identity, that they had lost. But this new Hindu identity could be reconstructed only by the destruction of the antithetical “other.” The Muslim was the obverse of the tolerant, benign Hindu: fanatically intolerant, a destroyer of shrines, and an arch-tyrant. Throughout, Rithambra laced her speech with vivid images of mutilated corpses, amputated arms, chests cut open like those of dissected frogs, and bodies slashed, burned, raped, and violated, all evoking Mother India, desecrated and ravaged by Islam.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Old moth-eaten tigress shit sure turn into a fag eater.... So this citizen, being an arty and crafty fag, begins making costume jewelry and jewelry sets. Every rich old gash in Greater New York wants he should do her sets, and he is making money, 21, El Morocco, Stork, but no time for sex, and all the time worrying about his rep..., He begins playing the horses, supposed to be something manly about gambling God knows why, and he figures it will build him up to be seen at the track. Not many fags play the horses, and those that play lose more than the others, they are lousy gamblers plunge in a losing streak and hedge when they win... which being the pattern of their lives.... Now every child knows there is one law of gambling: winning and losing come in streaks. Plunge when you win, fold when you lose. (I once knew a fag dip into the till -- not the whole two thousand at once on the nose win or Sing Sing. Not our Gertie... Oh no a deuce at a time...) "So he loses and loses and lose some more. One day he is about to put a rock in a set when the obvious occur. 'Of course, I'll replace it later.' Famous last words. So all that winter, one after the other, the diamonds, emeralds, pearls, rubies and star sapphires of the haut monde go in hock and replaced by queer replicas.... "So the opening night of the Met this old hag appear as she thinks resplendent in her diamond tiara. So this other old whore approach and say, 'Oh, Miggles, you're so smart... to leave the real ones at home.... I mean we're simply mad to go around tempting fate.' " 'You're mistaken, my dear. These are real.' " 'Oh but Miggles dahling, they're not.... I mean ask your jeweler.... Well just ask anybody . Haaaaaa.' "So a Sabbath is hastily called. (Lucy Bradshinkel, look to thy emeralds. ) All these old witches examining their rocks like a citizen find leprosy on himself. " 'My chicken blood ruby!' " 'My black oopalls!' Old bitch marry so many times so many gooks and spics she don't know her accent from her ass.... " 'My stah sahphire!' shriek a poule de luxe . 'Oh it's all so awfull' " 'I mean they are strictly from Woolworth's....' " 'There's only one thing to do. I'm going to call the police,' says a strong-minded, outspoken old thing; and she clump across the floor on her low heels and calls the fuzz." "Well, the faggot draws a deuce; and in the box he meets this cat who is some species of cheap hustler, and love sets in or at least a facsimile thereof convince the parties inna first and second parts.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street. The aspiring actor/model/part-time maitre d' will break out in a flop sweat, trying to figure out where to hide him—if "La Migra" hasn't already grabbed him on the way to dinner. There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self- deluding than the industry-approved image of "the chef." We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who's making that nice risotto with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, the pan-seared hamachi with sauce vierge, the ravioli of beef cheeks with sage and sauce madere . . . We know, to our eternal shame, who is more likely to show up every day, dig in, do the right thing, cook conscientiously, endure without complaint: our perennially unrecognized coworkers from Mexico, Ecuador, and points south. The ones you don't see hurling around catchphrases on the TV Food Network, or grinning witlessly at the camera after the latest freebie for the Beard House. What is the heart of the matter? The answer to this simple question: When was the last time you saw an American dishwasher? And if you saw one—would you hire him? If you're like me, probably not. The best cooks are ex-dishwashers. Hell, the best people are ex-dishwashers. Because who do you want in your kitchen, when push comes to shove, and you're in danger of falling in the weeds and the orders are pouring in and the number-one oven just went down and the host just sat a twelve-top and there's a bad case of the flu that's been tearing through the staff like the Vandals through Rome? Do you want an educated, CIA-trained American know-it-all like I was early in my career? A guy who's going to sulk if you speak harshly to him? A guy who's certain there's a job waiting for him somewhere else ("Maybe . . . like Aspen, man . . . or the Keys . . . I can cook and maybe hit the slopes on my days off, or the beach")? Or some resume-building aspiring chef ("Yeah, dude . . . I'm thinking of like leaving here next month . . . maybe going to do a stage with Thomas Keller or Dean Fearing... He rocks. . .

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [21] The (so far, incomplete) nemesis of Bash Camps was John Smyth, as charismatic as Peter Ball but in a completely different mould as a successful Evangelical lawyer: the conservative Methodist Mrs Mary Whitehouse was among his clients when her moral campaigns reached the law courts. An extrovert family man with easy access to certain public schools, Smyth rose to be chairman of the Iwerne Trust (the sponsor of the ‘Bash Camps’), as well as a trustee of the closely related Scripture Union. Once in contact with schoolboys, he would select some for grooming and work out his own moral chaos on them, particularly through repeated sessions of flagellation, which in some cases he continued into their life after schooldays. Gradually evidence of Smyth’s crimes began to emerge; he was nevertheless not reported to the police, but simply forced to step back from his positions of responsibility, and in 1984 he emigrated to southern Africa. There his pattern of offending continued, including the unexplained death of a young man in Zimbabwe. He himself died in South Africa before he could face trial. At the time of writing, Anglican conservative Evangelical leaders have failed to face up adequately to what happened, nor have they fully addressed the implications of other analogous behaviour in the same circle. One response has been a rebranding exercise, in which the Iwerne Trust has become the Titus Trust. [22] WEAPONIZING

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Amid Mark’s general lack of comment on Jesus’s parentage, there is one remarkable moment where he ventriloquizes the people of Jesus’s home town as offensively calling Jesus ‘the son of Mary’ as well as brother of James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. This phrase ‘son of Mary’ would normally indicate that the addressee’s father was unknown. Matthew, Luke and an echo of the story in John all briskly alter the alarming usage to highlight Joseph, only Matthew keeping any reference at all to Mary; but Matthew and Luke then provide two different accounts of the circumstances of Jesus’s birth in their Infancy Narratives. [8] In Matthew, Joseph is the main actor, and in Luke, Mary. Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s initial horror at Mary’s pregnancy; he has to be instructed by an angel in a dream not to follow his instinct to repudiate his young betrothed, for this child is the Messiah (Matt. 1.18–22). Matthew, of all the Gospel writers, is the most concerned to link Jesus’s ministry to the Judaic past, and his narrative here is in dialogue with the terms of Judaic law in Deuteronomy (Deut. 22.20–29), which discusses what should happen when a betrothed virgin is seduced or raped. The penalty in Deuteronomy is execution by stoning: kindly Joseph instead resolves to end the betrothal quietly, even before the angelic intervention. Luke seems more indirect than Matthew, but when in his story the angel Gabriel tells Mary of her pregnancy, she immediately asks him how that can be, since she has no husband (Luke 1.34). In fact, Luke goes much further than Matthew. Among the songs he incorporates into his Infancy Narratives are two hymns of victory, still commonly used in the various Christian regular daily rounds of worship called ‘Offices’. One is attributed to John the Baptist’s father Zacharias (the canticle ‘Benedictus’ used for instance in Anglican Morning Prayer), and the other to Mary herself (the ‘Magnificat’ of Anglican Evensong). Not all their content is relevant to their present context, and it has been plausibly suggested that they are martial songs borrowed from the Maccabean period more than a century before, but their general message of renewal and the overthrow of existing power suits Luke’s purpose. [9] Significant therefore is Mary’s proclamation in the Magnificat that God ‘has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden ’ (Luke 1.48). Those Revised Standard Version translations underplay the shock value of these words to their early Christian readers. ‘Low estate’ renders tapeinōsis , which in its many shades of meaning stretches to ‘humiliation’, ‘disgrace’ or ‘baseness’: ‘handmaiden’ hardly hits the essence of doulē , which starkly means ‘female slave’, and which would therefore immediately suggest someone available for the humiliation of sexual assault. It was thus perfectly appropriate for Jane Schaberg to suggest the possibility that, in his use of this vocabulary, Luke is portraying Mary as the victim of rape.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Across the Catholic world, the outwardly celibate, claustrophobically single-sex world of the clergy had become a haven for gay men terrified of their sexuality: a ready-made alibi with the bonus of traditional prestige. In the absence of any moral code to make sense of their contradictions, their activities were liable to be full of self-hatred and devoid of anything resembling a moral compass. [16] Trujillo’s story is put in the shade by Pope John Paul’s protégé, the priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, who had grown up while Mexico was riven by violent confrontation between an anti-clerical government and defiant popular Catholicism; he was the founder of the militantly proselytizing and fervently orthodox Legion of Christ, which spread far beyond his native country. Persistent accusations of Maciel’s sexual abuse, ranging from paedophilia to adult sexual assault to the fathering of children, were ignored in Rome up to the very end of John Paul II’s long pontificate. Not so under his successor Benedict

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  XVI, who as Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Roman Inquisition) had done his best to rein in Pope John Paul’s wilder theological impulses. In May 2006 a statement about Maciel was issued on behalf of Benedict’s own successor as Prefect, that the Church had decided ‘taking account of the advanced age of the Reverend Maciel and his delicate health – to renounce any canonical process and to invite the Father to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing every public ministry’. That was the extent of any action against Maciel before his death in 2008. [17] At last the Vatican was showing signs of taking the abuse problem seriously, but the damage had been done, and Benedict’s sense of its daunting scale was one factor in his unanticipated resignation in 2013. The wider world was losing its patience. The crisis was larger than sexual abuse; it was a general abuse of clerical power and prestige by damaged or frightened personalities among the clergy, particularly in covering up abuse where it was unearthed. Certain states founded on their Catholic identity, such as the Canadian province of Quebec or the Kingdom of Belgium, saw church attendance plummet, but nowhere has the reaction been more extreme than in the Irish Republic. The tipping point came in the 1990s when certain prominent priests, notably the extrovert Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey, were revealed as having clandestine female partners and children. Back in Archbishop McQuaid’s days, ‘everyone knew…and at the same time they managed not to know’ about ecclesiastical misuse of power; now the revelations poured out in increasing detail. [18] Particularly devastating was the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes published by the Irish government in 2020, which included details of archaeological work on the site of a sewage tank containing the remains of illegitimate babies from a Catholic-run children’s home in Tuam. On cherished shibboleths in the Vatican I construction of a Catholic family, the Irish population and its representatives in the Dáil (Parliament) now repeatedly exercised their right of rejection, despite strong attempts from the Church authorities to influence the votes. In 1993 male homosexual practice ceased to be illegal; in 1995 a referendum approved divorce (a result which was now backed by all the Republic’s political leaders); in 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce equal marriage for same-sex couples by popular vote; and in 2018 a decisive two-to-one referendum vote led to an end on the ban on abortion. Already in 2011, the Republic had pointedly closed its embassy in the Vatican, while Archbishop McQuaid’s posthumous reaction to an openly gay man becoming Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in 2017 is not recorded.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  necessary disclosure, I was involved in the early stages of GCM’s development. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 13 . This mordant coinage of the Anglo-Catholic socialist priest Fr Kenneth Leech began differently ordered, as ‘lace, gin and backbiting’, in Leech’s letter to the Catholic Standard (Nov. 1975), 3, then reported in the Church Times , 12 Dec. 1975. Popular usage gave it the more punchy formulation; see K. Leech, ‘Beyond gin and lace: homosexuality and the Anglo-Catholic subculture’, in Speaking Love’s Name: Homosexuality: some Catholic and socialist reflections , Jubilee Group Pamphlets (London, 1988), 16–27, at 16. Matthew Bemand-Qureshi helped me excavate this intellectual genealogy. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 14 . See W. Whyte, ‘OutRage! Hypocrisy, episcopacy, and homosexuality in England, 1968–1995’, in K. Cubitt (ed.), The Church and Hypocrisy , Studies in Church History 60 (forthcoming). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 15 . J. Cornwell, The Pope in Winter: The dark face of John Paul II’s papacy (London, 2004), 234–46. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 16 . F. Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, homosexuality, hypocrisy (London, 2019), 279–97, and 82, 123. For a summary discussion of the whole problem against a long-term background, see J. Cornwell, The Dark Box: A secret history of confession (London, 2014), ch. 10. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16 17 . Vatican Press Office statement, 19 May 2006: clumsily translated from the Italian http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/update/maciel_communique.pdf (accessed 19 Dec. 2023). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17 18 . A phrase of the novelist John Banville, reviewing O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves , Times Literary Supplement , 17 Dec. 2021, 3–4. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 19 . Fuller, ‘Catholicism in 20th-century Ireland’, 497, 504, 507; C. Gribben, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford, 2021), 205–6. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 20 . While there is as yet no monograph on the Ball affair, a devastating account of his activities is provided by Dame Moira Gibb’s independent report, ‘An abuse of faith’, commissioned by the Church of England: churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/the-independent-peter-ball-review.pdf (accessed 11 Jan. 2024). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 21 . A scathing newspaper article on the Bash Camp atmosphere from a female Evangelical insider and first-hand witness is A. Atkins, ‘Inside the sexual apartheid of John Smyth’s summer camps’, Daily Telegraph , 3 Feb. 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 22 . Currently the best way of following the story is the Independent Report, J. Pickles and G. Woods, Review into the Abuse by John Smyth of Pupils and Former Pupils of Winchester College (Winchester, 2021), commissioned by the College and published with admirable honesty on the internet: https://www.winchestercollege.org/assets/files/uploads/john-smyth-review-winchester-college-jan-2022- final.pdf (accessed 2 Dec. 2023). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 23 . A sympathetic analysis of Johnston is A. Atherstone, ‘Christian family, Christian nation: Raymond Johnston and Nationwide Festival of Light in defence of the family’, in J. Doran, C. Methuen and A. Walsham (eds), Religion and the Household , Studies in Church History 50 (Woodbridge, 2014), 456–68.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Those who fell under Eastern skies or on their way to the East received the benefits of special indulgence for sins committed and were esteemed in the popular judgment as martyrs. John VIII., 872–882, pressed by the Saracens who were devastating Italy, had promised to soldiers fighting bravely against the pagans the rest of eternal life and, as far as it belonged to him to give it, absolution from sins.302 This precedent was followed by Urban II., who promised the first Crusaders marching to Jerusalem that the journey should be counted as a substitute for penance.303 Eugenius, 1146, went farther, in distinctly promising the reward of eternal life. The virtue of the reward was extended to the parents of those taking part in Crusades. Innocent III. included in the plenary indulgence those who built ships and contributed in any way, and promised to them "increase of eternal life." God, said the abbot Guibert, chronicler of the First Crusade, invented the Crusades as a new way for the laity to atone for their sins, and to merit salvation.304 The rewards were not confined to spiritual privileges. Eugenius III., in his exhortations to the Second Crusade, placed the Crusaders in the same category with clerics before the courts in the case of most offences.305 The kings of France, from 1188 to 1270 joined with the Holy See in granting to them temporal advantages, exemption from debt, freedom from taxation and the payment of interest. Complaint was frequently made by the kings of France that the Crusaders committed the most offensive crimes under cover of ecclesiastical protection. These complaints called forth from Innocent IV., 1246, and Alexander IV., 1260, instructions to the bishops not to protect such offenders. William of Tyre, in his account of the First Crusade, and probably reading into it some of the experiences of a later date, says (bk. I. 16), "Many took the cross to elude their creditors."306 If it is hard for us to unite the idea of war and bloodshed with the achievement of a purely religious purpose, it must be remembered that no such feeling prevailed in the Middle Ages. The wars of the period of Joshua and the Judges still formed a stimulating example. Chrysostom, Augustine, and other Church Fathers of the fifth century lifted up their voices against the violent destruction of heathen temples which went on in Egypt and Gaul; but whatever compunction might have been felt for the wanton slaying of Saracens by Christian armies in an attitude of aggression, the compunction was not felt when the Saracens placed themselves in the position of holding the sacred sites of Palestine.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He was the first to cast off the Jewish prejudices against the unclean heathen and to fraternize with the Gentile converts at Caesarea and at Antioch; and he was the first to withdraw from them in cowardly fear of the narrow-minded Judaizers from Jerusalem, for which inconsistency he had to submit to a humiliating rebuke of Paul.292 But Peter was as quick in returning to his right position as in turning away from it. He most sincerely loved the Lord from the start and had no rest nor peace till he found forgiveness. With all his weakness he was a noble, generous soul, and of the greatest service in the church. God overruled his very sins and inconsistencies for his humiliation and spiritual progress. And in his Epistles we find the mature result of the work of purification, a spirit most humble, meek, gentle, tender, loving, and lovely. Almost every word and incident in the gospel history connected with Peter left its impress upon his Epistles in the way of humble or thankful reminiscence and allusion. His new name, "Rock," appears simply as a "stone" among other living stones in the temple of God, built upon Christ, "the chief corner-stone."293 His charge to his fellow-presbyters is the same which Christ gave to him after the resurrection, that they should be faithful "shepherds of the flock" under Christ, the chief "shepherd and bishop of their souls."294 The record of his denial of Christ is as prominent in all the four Gospels, as Paul’s persecution of the church is in the Acts, and it is most prominent—as it would seem under his own direction—in the Gospel of his pupil and "interpreter" Mark, which alone mentions the two cock-crows, thus doubling the guilt of the denial,295 and which records Christ’s words of censure ("Satan"), but omits Christ’s praise ("Rock").296 Peter made as little effort to conceal his great sin, as Paul. It served as a thorn in his flesh, and the remembrance kept him near the cross; while his recovery from the fall was a standing proof of the power and mercy of Christ and a perpetual call to gratitude. To the Christian Church the double story of Peter’s denial and recovery has been ever since an unfailing source of warning and comfort. Having turned again to his Lord, who prayed for him that his personal faith fail not, he is still strengthening the brethren.297 As to his official position in the church, Peter stood from the beginning at the head of the Jewish apostles, not in a partisan sense, but in a large-hearted spirit of moderation and comprehension. He never was a narrow, contracted, exclusive sectarian.

• From The Girls (2016)

  The Ritz crackers, earnest groups crammed around bowls of watery ice. Talking SDS and comparing reading lists. I half shrugged, the barest shift of a shoulder. He seemed to understand this gesture for the falsehood it was. “Maybe I should write down my number for you,” Tom said. “It’s the hall phone, but you can just ask for me.” I could hear the stark billow of Suzanne’s laughter carrying in the air. “That’s okay,” I said. “There’s no phone here, anyway.” “They aren’t nice,” Tom said, catching my eyes. He looked like a rural preacher after a baptism, the wet pants clinging to his legs, his earnest stare. “What do you know?” I said, an alarming heat rising in my cheeks. “You don’t even know them.” Tom made an abortive gesture with his hands. “It’s a trash heap,” he said, sputtering, “can’t you see that?” He indicated the crumbling house, the tangle of overgrown vegetation. All the junked-out cars and oil drums and picnic blankets abandoned to the mold and the termites. I saw it all, but I didn’t absorb anything: I’d already hardened myself to him and there was nothing else to say. —Tom’s departure allowed the girls to deepen into their natures without the fracture of an outsider’s gaze. No more peaceful, sleepy chatter, no balmy stretches of easy silence. “Where’s your special friend?” Suzanne said. “Your old pal?” Her hollow affect, her leg jiggling even though her expression was blank. I tried to laugh like they did, but I didn’t know why I got unnerved at the thought of Tom returning to Berkeley. He was right about the junk in the yard, there was more of it, and maybe Nico really could have been hurt, and what then? I noticed all of them had gotten skinnier, not just Donna, a brittle quality to their hair, a dull drain behind the eyes. When they smiled, I glimpsed the coated tongues seen on the starving. Without consciously doing so, I pinned a lot of hope on Russell’s return. Wanting him to weigh down the flapping corners of my thoughts. “Heartbreaker,” Russell catcalled when he caught sight of me. “You run off all the time,” he said, “and it breaks our hearts when you leave us behind.” I tried to convince myself, seeing the familiarity of Russell’s face, that the ranch was the same, though when he hugged me, I saw something smeared at his jawline. It was his sideburns. They were not stippled, like hair, but flat. I looked closer. They were drawn on, I saw, with some kind of charcoal or eyeliner. The thought disturbed me; the perverseness, the fragility of the deception. Like a boy I’d known in Petaluma who shoplifted makeup to cover his pimples. Russell’s hand worked my neck, passing along a fritter of energy. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. And how immediately the group jolted to attention at his arrival, trooping in his wake like ragged ducklings.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Awake all night, as if my labored vigil would protect us, my hours of suffering a one-to-one offering. It seemed unbelievable that Tamar or my father didn’t notice how pale I was, how suddenly desperate for their company. They expected life would march on. Things had to be done, and I got shunted along their logistics with the numbness that had taken the place of whatever had made me Evie. My love of cinnamon hard candies, what I dreamed—that had all been exchanged for this new self, the changeling who nodded when spoken to and rinsed and dried the dinner plates, hands reddening in the hot water. I had to pack up my room at my mother’s house before I went to boarding school. My mother had ordered me the Catalina uniform—I found two navy skirts and a middy blouse folded on my bed, the fabric stinking of industrial cleaner, like rental tablecloths. I didn’t bother to try on the clothes, shoving them into a suitcase on top of tennis shoes. I didn’t know what else to pack, and it didn’t seem to matter. I stared at the room in a trance. All my once beloved things—a vinyl diary, a birthstone charm, a book of pencil drawings—seemed valueless and defunct, drained of an animating force. It was impossible to picture what type of girl would ever have liked those things. Ever worn a charm around her wrist or written accounts of her day. “You need a bigger suitcase?” my mother said from my doorway, startling me. Her face looked rumpled, and I could smell how much she’d been smoking. “You can take my red one, if you want.” I thought that she’d notice the change in me even if Tamar or my father couldn’t. The baby fat in my face disappeared, a hard scrape to my features. But she hadn’t mentioned anything. “This is fine,” I said. My mother paused, surveying my room. The mostly empty suitcase. “The uniform fits?” she asked. I hadn’t even tried it on, but I nodded, wrung into a new acquiescence. “Good, good.” When she smiled, her lips cracked and I was suddenly overcome. —I was shoving books into the closet when I found two milky Polaroids, hidden under a stack of old magazines. The sudden presence of Suzanne in my room: her hot feral smile, the pudge of her breasts. I could call up disgust for her, hopped up on Dexedrine and sweating from the effort of butchery, and at the same time be pulled in by a helpless drift—here was Suzanne. I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn’t. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I’d never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone’s head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  147 o In Constantinople, he studied biblical exegesis with the great theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. o Jerome spent three years as the secretary and counselor to Pope Damasus I, one of the most powerful of the early bishops of Rome. Damasus assigned him the task of translating the entire bible into Latin in order to provide a standard text (the Vulgate) to replace the many “Old Latin” versions. o Jerome moved to Bethlehem in 389, where he lived as a hermit until his death in 419/20. Among his many writings, his Lives of Eminent Men is an indispensable biographical source for early Christian history. His commentaries on biblical books also show careful attention to historical realities and linguistic accuracy. o Jerome’s towering achievement was undoubtedly the Vulgate translation of the Old Testament (from Hebrew) and the New Testament (from Greek), which provided the standard text for medieval Latin Christianity. • The final doctor, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), is by far the best known man of late antiquity because of his autobiographical Confessions (composed in 397/98). It is a remarkable composition, both as the first truly introspective analysis of a personal life in antiquity and as a sustained song of praise to God. o Born in North Africa of a pagan father and a devout Christian mother (Monica), Augustine was educated in rhetoric and lived what he later considered a dissolute life, siring an illegitimate son. o He converted to the dualistic religion called Manichaeism (a combination of Persian and Christian Gnostic systems), attracted by its ascetical appeal. He embraced its radical dualism between matter and spirit, which seemed to offer Augustine’s intellectual soul some liberation from his passion- driven body.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  227 • The army of Christian knights crossed the Balkans and Asia Minor, conquering Antioch in 1098 and liberating Jerusalem in 1099. The First Crusade was far and away the most successful of all the expeditions. o Fortified Latin states were established in Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, and Edessa, with subsidiary fiefdoms established in Galilee, Transjordan, Jaffa, and Ascalon. The states lasted from 50 to 100 years. o In Jerusalem in 1099, some knights banded together to provide hospice for pilgrims (the Knights Hospitaller), and in 1119, others vowed to protect pilgrims on their way to the church of the Holy Sepulchre (the Knights Templar). These knights organized themselves along the lines of religious orders, with a commitment to piety. The Second Crusade • The Second Crusade was called by Pope Eugene III in 1147 because of the shocking collapse of the Latin state of Edessa to the Saracens. • The pope enlisted Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the most influential figures in Christendom, to preach the Crusade, which Bernard did through an extended tour. • This Crusade was led by King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany. Once more, mob action was carried out against Jews across Germany, leading Bernard and other leaders to condemn such action. • The military effort in the East was a failure, except for the 13,000 troops who—carrying out another, more local program—managed to free Lisbon from Muslim control. o The great Kurdish Muslim general Saladin (1138–1192) overran Jerusalem and eliminated the Latin state there in 1187. o The Christians were reduced to occupying the stronghold at Tyre, a humiliating setback.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  partners. The system was disintegrating in the late medieval period thanks to social change, but not fast enough for many serfs, some of whom had become prosperous on their tied property, resented the restrictions on their families and found their status shaming. Accordingly, some ingenious fifteenth-century lawyer invented a legal process to guarantee serfs freedom, dependent on the principle that serfdom passes through the male line, and that therefore someone whose father is unknown cannot be a serf: bastardia contra villenagium , ‘bastardy against villeinage’, as an anonymous clerk once gleefully commented in the margin of his legal register. This charade was dependent on co-operation between the bishop of a diocese and the royal courts of the ‘common law’ in Westminster (the Court of Common Pleas took the business on): it produced a neat legal fiction. The serf began a legal action about a more-or-less fictional piece of land against his lord. The lord generally replied that the case could not be heard since the plaintiff was his serf and therefore had no legal identity – to which the serf riposted that he was illegitimate and could not be the lord’s serf (sometimes it was the lord as defendant who claimed that the plaintiff was illegitimate and so had no legal title). In consternation the judges in Common Pleas turned to the bishop of the diocese containing the relevant manor, who obligingly confirmed this rural scandal. So the legal action ended with a judgment in Common Pleas: the plaintiff lost his case, and he was declared a bastard – but he was not a serf. The whole business, of course, involved a good deal of money changing hands all round, including set legal fees. The diocese of Norwich in particular made some tidy little sums out of it, all in the name of personal freedom – the lawsuits spanned the Reformation, between around 1440 and 1580, by which time English serfdom was more or less extinct. By then, in tragic irony, Protestant England was being drawn into a different and much more inhuman institution of slavery, the Atlantic traffic between Africa and the growing colonial empires of both Catholic and Protestant European powers in the Americas. [89] It is unlikely that the ‘Reformation of Manners’ would have succeeded without the general population feeling sympathetic to a change in sexual standards, and being prepared to see those standards enforced in various forms of public shaming for fornication or adultery, such as the elaborate rituals of penance retained in the Church of Scotland, not otherwise a friend to formal liturgy. Scotland was only one example of a Reformed Protestant society where the laity were directly involved in administering this system, not merely as spectators in church, but as lay ‘elders’ who dominated the new Reformed disciplinary court known as the Consistory.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “I just don’t get it,” Zav went on, addressing Sasha, “why you stay with Julian. You’re too hot for him.” Sasha giggled, though I glanced back and saw her labor to calculate a response. “I mean, she’s a babe,” Zav said to Julian, “am I right?” Julian smiled what I thought of as the smile of an only son, someone who believed he would always get what he wanted. He probably always had. The three of them were lit like a scene from a movie I was too old to watch. “But Sasha and I know each other, don’t we?” Zav smiled at her. “I like Sasha.” Sasha held a basic smile on her face, her fingers tidying the pile of torn label. “She doesn’t like her tits,” Julian said, pulsing the back of her neck, “but I tell her they’re nice.” “Sasha!” Zav affected upset. “You have great tits.” I flushed, hurrying to finish the dishes. “Yeah,” Julian said, his hand still on her neck. “Zav would tell you if you didn’t.” “I always tell the truth,” Zav said. “He does,” Julian said. “That’s true.” “Show me,” Zav said. “They’re too small,” Sasha said. Her mouth was tight like she was making fun of herself, and she shifted in her seat. “They’ll never sag, so that’s good,” Julian said. Tickling her shoulder. “Let Zav see.” Sasha’s face reddened. “Do it, babe,” Julian said, a harshness in his voice making me glance over. I caught Sasha’s eye—I told myself the look in her face was pleading. “Come on, you guys,” I said. The boys turned with amused surprise. Though I think they were tracking where I was all along. That my presence was a part of the game. “What?” Julian said, his face snapping into innocence. “Just cool it,” I told him. “Oh, it’s fine,” Sasha said. Laughing a little, her eyes on Julian. “What exactly are we doing?” Julian said. “What exactly should we ‘cool’?” He and Zav snorted—how quickly all the old feelings came back, the humiliating interior fumble. I crossed my arms, looking to Sasha. “You’re bothering her.” “Sasha’s fine,” Julian said. He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear—she smiled faintly and with effort. “Besides,” he went on, “are you really someone who should be lecturing us?” My heart tightened. “Didn’t you, like, kill someone?” Julian said. Zav sucked his teeth, then let loose a nervous laugh. My voice sounded strangled. “Of course not.” “But you knew what they were going to do,” Julian said. Grinning with the thrill of capture. “You were there with Russell Hadrick and shit.” “Hadrick?” Zav said. “Are you shitting me?” I tried to rein in the hysterical lean coming into my voice. “I was barely around.” Julian shrugged. “That’s not what it sounded like.” “You don’t really believe that.” But there was no entry point in any of their faces. “Sasha said you told her so,” Julian went on.